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Monday, March 24, 2014

Hollow Documentary as New Media and Procedural Rhetoric

Elaine McMillian’s Interactive Documentary experience,
“Hollow Documentary”[1] is
an interesting piece of transmedia storytelling.With a large amount of give-and-take between
visible traditional mediums (photographs and videos) and the invisible
technological platforms that support and showcase them.Together, and along with more interactive
mediums like data-collection charts and graphs, they create an overall
user-experience that shares some elements with the procedural rhetoric
described by Ian Bogost.[2]

The project certainly utilizes the new media logic described
by Manovich[3],
that it “privileges the existence of potentially numerous copies, infinitely
large number of different states of the same work, author-user symbiosis (the
user can change the work through interactivity), the collective, collaborative
authorship, and network distribution (which bypasses the art system
distribution channels.)”Though it
appears that by bypassing those very distribution channels the creator has
found herself with an economic conundrum.The site costs upwards of $700 each month to maintain, and too few
people are willing to pay to access or support something that is, by nature of
its platform, “free.”This is a first
sense in which McMillian’s project shares characteristics with Bogost’s
examples of procedural rhetoric.As the
singular “author” of this piece, she fits his “concept of authorship
incorporate[ing] another feature of art more broadly: the pursuit of a
particular truth irrespective of the demands of reception or sales.”

Ultimately McMillian’s project is a intermediary example of
new media, because so much of the content has been produced in traditional,
more linear-fashion, and certainly with a near-minimum of technological
involvement.This is an example of
Manovich’s description of “Human-computer interface com[ing] to act as a new
form through which all older forms of cultural production are being
mediated.”Manovich seemed to lament
that “Software is used in some areas of film production but not in others.While some visuals may be created using
computer animation, cinema [still] centers around the system of human stars
whose salaries amount to a large percent of a film budget… the computer is kept
out of the key “creative” decisions, and is delegated to the position of a
technician.”While the “stars” of this
piece were not of the “large-percent of a film budget” variety, the footage
filmed of and by them was still created using a minimum of technology and software.This, along with the linear, unidirectional
movement of the web-navigation of the Interactive Documentary both combine to
limit the ways in which this project applies to a variety of definitions of new
media.However, Manovich allowed that
“Both then and now, the filmmakers used new filmmaking technology to revolt
against the existing cinema conventions that were perceived as being too
artificial.Both then and now, the key
word of this revolt was the same: “immediacy.””And “immediacy” is something this project capitalizes on profoundly.

This project cannot be perfectly applied to Bogost’s
definitions of proceduralist rhetoric either, because while Bogost claims that
“A proceduralist rhetoric makes a claim about how something works by modeling
its processes in the process-native environment of the computer rather than
using description (writing) or depiction (images),“This project and its platform attempts to
create a claim about how something works by creating an immersive experience
that certainly requires the user’s navigation of the experience, but also
relies heavily upon words, images, and an often-didactic style to set clearly
defined parameters for the user’s interpretation of their experience.

Still, the project does succeed at a level of emulation of
other of Bogost’s criteria, such as that “A proceduralist rhetoric does not
argue a position but rather characterizes an idea.These games say something about how an
experience of the world works, how it feels to experience or to be subjected to
some sort of situation.”By creating a
rather cultural-studies-centric platform giving voice to the under-represented
communities of a “dying county,” this project attempted to make an “experience
of the world” available for the exploration of its audience.And it is certainly left up to a viewer to
put all the pieces the documentary makes available together into a picture of a
whole experience or reality, or social message.

In this sense the documentary succeeds at two more of
Bogost’s criteria for Proceduralist rhetoric, that the “goal of the
proceduralist designer is to cause the player to reflect on one or more themes
during or after play, without a concern for resolution or effect,” and that
“These games pose questions about life and simulate specific experiences in
response, but those experiences rarely point players toward definitive
answers.”McMillian’s documentary hints
at constructive efforts being made to vitalize these communities, but doesn’t
pose any answers for the heavy overarching questions and problems she presents.
The impossibilities of unemployment and
drug use are left for the viewer to wrestle with, and make sense of. Because
there is not a single narrative, and no definitive “end” to the documentary
project (they continue to collect photos, videos, tweets, and statistics on
ancillary websites)[4],
the platform itself renders an answer or resolution or “ending” impossible.

While it might have been more applicable had the platform
allowed for more difference in individual user experience with this text, this
is certainly an artifact that engages with its audience in a manner Bogost
would attribute to Art, and ultimately to Proceduralist Games.Despite the fact that scrolling through this
documentary provides essentially the same experience for every viewer (with
only the option to click or not click on the hyperlinks that pass through in a
set order), it is a text that requires engagement and invites change in its
audience. “Art has done many things in
human history, but in the last century especially, it has primarily tried to
bother and provoke us.To force us to
see things differently.Art
changes.Its very purpose, we might say,
is to change, and to change us along with it.”